Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books. I’ve had the good fortune to listen to a series of recordings with excellent narrators. These include (for all but the first item, links go to iTunes so you can hear a sample) Tom Stechschulte reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (see the audio player at the bottom of the post), SteveMartin, David Rakoff and David Sedaris. I’ve probably only listened to 15 audiobooks in my whole life, so lately I’ve been making an accidental study of the form. My first conclusion: the narrator matters. A lot.
Just as the aesthetics of a book–its size, shape, typography, paper, etc–influence our reading, so too does the narrator influence our listening. In fact, I think the narrator’s impact is much broader. Consider what makes the aforementioned narrators great:
They have distinctive voices. Some have deep, resonant voices–voices made for radio, but all of them are recognizably specific. Stechschulte has a gravelly rasp, Martin’s voice is mellifluous and Sedaris seems to have a bit of a gay lisp.
They care about pronunciation. For me, hearing a word mispronounced in a professional recording is a bit like recognizing a location in a movie. It distracts me from the narrative.
They understand cadence, and adjust the pacing of their reading to reflect the story’s inertia.
If they do voice work, they do it well. This involves some degree of acting. If done poorly, or half-ass, it really ruins a recording. Done well, it can really elevate a book. Of course, this involves interpretation of the author’s words, but it’s a trade-off I happily make.
This is harder to evaluate, but they sound like they care about and are invested in the work.
This all came to mind because the narrator of the latest audio book I’m listening to is totally ordinary. It’s a business book, and narrated by the author (there’s no need to name and censure him for something outside his, uh, skill set). By ‘ordinary’, I just mean average. I’m sure, should we record an audio version of our book, we’ll do no better. It’s too bad that everybody can’t hire a narrator like Tom Stechschulte, but I expect that the economics of the publishing industry preclude that.
I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
The Road tells a simple story. A boy and his father walk some along a road in a dead America, years after a nuclear holocaust. An eternal nuclear winter has set in. Nearly everything that’s not human–every plant, bird, fish, mammal–has died. The world is two colours–grey and black. Nothing has a name–not towns, states, not even the characters in the book.
The novel is relentlessly, unapologetically bleak. The two characters live on hope alone, and we see that thin hope ravaged again and again. It’s beautifully-written, but the unceasing gloominess can be a bit trying. If Samuel Beckett wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, it might read like this. Only, Beckett’s work would be a bit cheerier.
This was the first McCarthy book I’ve ever read. I tried to get into Blood Meridian a couple of times, but it never took. His diction is extraordinary–he seems to choose exactly the right word every time. Here’s Janet Maslin in The New York Times
Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.
Though it’s filled with the details of survival, he still manages to maintain a sparseness to his story. I admired the tension he achieved between the minutiae of the protagonists’ daily lives, and the epic disaster that surrounded them.
The sparseness reminded me of Hemingway, and Jennifer Egan mentions him frequently in her review of the book for Slate:
The man, who goes unnamed, is an outdoorsman in the Hemingway tradition. His savvy and wits kept him alive through the apocalypse—he began filling a bathtub with water as soon as he heard the explosions—and have sustained him and his son through the following years of misrule by marauding gangs of thugs who steal, kill, and eat the only fresh food still available: human flesh. His keen instincts rescue the pair several times over the course of the book as they head south, toward the coast, hoping for warmer weather. He’s good at building and repairing things, and McCarthy enumerates the mechanics of this work with a meditative absorption that evokes Hemingway.
I wanted to single out Tom Stechschulte, an actor who narrated the audiobook. ‘Narrated’ is actually the wrong verb–he performed it. His voice work added a richness and depth to the book that made it all the more enjoyable. He reminded me a bit of George Guidall, who narrated Stephen King’s Dark Tower books.
I grabbed a little excerpt that highlights Stechschulte’s great voice (there’s no dialogue in it, but you can get the idea) and McCarthy’s fantastic prose:
